Boosting the Signal
I had a day “out of the office” yesterday (not to be confused with the previous 360 consecutive days out of the physical office since March 13, 2020). I just had a day off, which shouldn’t be a particularly big deal. If anything urgent happened I would have received a phone call, otherwise I should easily be able to catch up with things on my return. I filter my email so it’s a pleasant place these days, even after a few days without checking. Slack, on the other hand, is a complete disaster zone.
In my head I have long since departed all channels that I don’t need to be in, and I only inhabit a few high-value, high signal-to-noise ratio ones. In reality, I have one day off and I’m snow-blinded by dozens of attention-seeking hashtags and red dots which results in a laborious routine of submissively channel-clicking and back-scrolling through history, desperately scanning for signs of value among a brain-frying array of links, mentions and updates. By the time I get to the end of it all I’ve forgotten most of it and bookmarked a few things which I will forget about and never return to until it’s far too late. Even if I do remember, I will be unlikely to find those few nuggets of gold that I’m sure I came across because I can’t quite make the search show me what I want. It’s a context-switching nightmare. Is this progress? Is this effective collaboration and communication? Is this “work happening”? I recommend pressing Shift-Esc and moving on. If it’s that important, someone will let you know.